We're buying a 60s detached house in need of full refurb and some internal remodelling. The ground floor layout is shown below. We were planning to remove the wall between kitchen and dining room to make one kitchen diner room. In the study, we'll take out the storage cupboard and brick up the external door. We were going to block up the doorway from study to rear hall and form a new doorway into the dining room. I'm starting to think that perhaps there's a better layout that I'm missing. Perhaps move have kitchen in existing study and open it up fully into the rear hall area and dining room to form one room. Then could have the existing kitchen as a study... There are other options too. Does anyone have any ideas on what you think would be the best layout? Any input would be brilliant! Thanks all
well 1st thing 1st before ripping out walls or changing layout is to know which walls are load bearing walls, once you know then you can determine the layout from this knowledge. Unless you are anticipating that changing layout means removing loadbearing walls and needing RSJ installed?
In this area of the house, there's only one loadbearing wall to worry about and thats the one between the kitchen and rear hall, and the dining room and study, this was the original external wall. The other internal loadbearing wall is the stair/chimney breast wall in the living room. We're anticipating putting lintels in wherever we knock through walls. My father in law fortunately is an engineer and my husband and I are both from building backgrounds so the technical side of things is sorted, its the layout that's really got us stumped though!
Try this for an idea, As you said block up the door to external wall, make this your dining room and remove the storage cupboard in this room and create a serving hatch between the new dining room and kitchen and still have the doors to the new dining room from the kitchen. Old dining room becomes study room and still keep where your kitchen and living room is, downside to this to get to the dining room either go though kitchen or study to get there. Or as you said you have the technical knowledge and your father in law knows his stuff, you could wall up half of the living room and then knock through into dining room, so then dining room takes up half of the living room and the living room continues into where the old dining room used to be creating open area around the stairs, so this then gives you clean access to both dining room and study without passing into either one.
I think it was Professor Plumb in the Study with the lead pipe I would think opening up the kitchen / dining room into the rear hall might be a bit embarrassing when dinner guests have to use a toilet directly off the kitchen diner